Windows Phone 7 un-lockable by developers?

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

Windows Phone 7 devices can be unlocked by developers. Or so says Tweakers.mobi, a Dutch technology site.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, developers working on WP7 can unlock and use the phones with no extra cost. While this makes sense, it's surprising in that other phone developers (such as Android and Apple) have to purchase the rights to unlock the phones.

Developers can unlock up to five units and dispose of the phone's security walls, making WP7 a little more attractive to them than perhaps other platforms. In addition, this will include side-loading of applications and running unsigned applications, something which consumers are not allowed to do.

Such methods are required for developers but also lead to advanced system modifications like on the iPhone ("jailbreaking") or flat out custom ROMs like Android ("rooting"). It's not clear what will happen with WP7 at this point, but holes in the system can be exploited--that's just a fact.

[via: WindowsPhoneThoughts & WMPoweruser]

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been here covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, Microsoft Surface, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics and ran the projectors at movie theaters, which has done absolutely nothing for his career.

9 Comments
  • This is the new windows mobile 7 ? I think the developers can unlock windows mobile 7 any time because they have all the rights of it.
  • This makes sense to me, and a good logical move by MS so devs can easily test their apps on a few different devices without going through marketplace. TechEd which is coming up soon should be full of WP7 news, also about business use and how they'll deploy apps in an enterprise environment.
  • I'm hoping someone figures out how to put WP7 on the EVO. That would generate a hell of a lot of free press for MS (not that they need it). But just as jailbreaking makes the iphone far more popular than it would be without that functionality, I would imagine it would say a lot to potential phone buyers if they see people running WP7 on such a sweet phone! I'm on Sprint and I think the person who chooses WM phones there really hates us as they pick only pick the clunky models (notice they didn't get the imagio but got the Touch Pro 2) or the worst designed models - they got the diamond. The design flaw made reception unreliable and the oscillating reception strength would kill you battery very quickly with minimal use. The EVO has some really really nice hardware but Android really isn't well designed for business needs YET. I'm looking forward to Android 2.3 as 2.2 shows tremendous strides in getting business needs and hopefully they'll continue in that vein.
  • Are you seriously trying to call the Touch Pro 2 clunky? That's one of the dumbest things I've read comments here and that says a lot.
  • The HTC HD2 is really quite similar, other than not having WiMax and a couple of camera differences (5MP, not 8MP rear camera, and no front camera - but we've had phones with front cameras for years in the UK, and now they're being removed because no-one ever uses video calling).
  • i'm pretty sure they mentioned this at MIX. We also know that enterprise administrators can sideload apps which would likely mean they could unlock their devices as well. i expect it won't take long at all for unlock hacks to appear on sites like XDA.
  • I think business/enterprise users will have a special feature that'll probably be in Server 2k8 R2 SP1 (coming later this year) to let you deploy WP7 apps and do other things over the network without having to unlock each phone to get your inhouse business apps loaded. Check the list of WP7 seassions at TechED, there's one specifically talking about this, I forget the exact title of it though.
  • I have a problem with this each time I run the sda unlock tool I get the message 'phone is not unlockable' and this message is followed by my friend saying that it has been sucessfully unlocked.So I am not getting actually the proper idea...
  • I think this is a great news. Really nothing is impossible in these days in the electronics technology.